Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen

  There are nights when Bill falls asleep thinking he is inside Apollo 8, but being caught in the trajectory of the moon this way is no bad thing. It’s a peaceful place to be. The motions of steering the rocket are as natural to him as eating and breathing. He closes his eyes and scans the radar for fatal mountain peaks, the ones that NASA hasn’t charted, and all the while they push on through a splendid, silent world, every movement as easy as being underwater. Below are the Sea of Crises and the Marsh of Sleep, names he could never have imagined really existing. Deep space is lavendercoloured, spangled with exactly the sort of bright lights you’d see in a child’s drawing and all Bill can think is how beautiful it really is, how ready he is for the impact.

  His sister visits sometimes. They joke about the irony of his bed being in E Bay, but it can’t dissipate the waiting or his worry that she isn’t taking care of herself properly. Ellen Hare has a tendency towards depression. It started when she was sixteen and before clocking any of the standard teenage milestones Bill had gotten to be an expert in recognizing the signs, a certain swooping grace to the way Ellen walked, a preoccupation with facts and lists, as if through the magic of numbers she could hold back tides, storms, war. It isn’t possible to rescue her from his hospital bed: when she comes to visit the change has occurred or it hasn’t. Bill’s own bad days are simple in comparison and centred mainly around intensive pain relief, but he cannot relieve Ellen of her pain and sometimes he is angry with her because she just seems to want to hold on to it all, and the intensity with which she does this is only possible because she doesn’t know real pain, just like he hadn’t known real pain, and if she did he can only think she’d want to get the fuck out of the pit she’s been wallowing in for thirty nine years. The truth of it is that his love for Ellen is no more than the relief that comes when he is done with being angry, but love is a terrible thing like that, Bill thinks, love of any kind is no better than some scavenger that comes laughing out of the dark to feast on the kill.

  On her next visit he says he’s worried she’s bit off-colour. Ellen Hare sweeps her hands, cupping the air in helpless parentheses by way of objection.

  ‘I’m eating a lot of food out of packets,’ she says. ‘That rice you do in the microwave? Maybe that’s it.’

  ‘Well you look like shit, love. When I get out of here there’s going to be some changes. You can’t live on microwave rice.’

  ‘It’s surprisingly good,’ she says and reaches for his hand from across the bed, holding it for a moment longer than is really required, because they both knew that although it is not yet impossible, it is increasingly unlikely that he will get out of here. A cellular blanket stretches out over the bed like the dim waters of the estuary he can see from his window at home and Ellen is distant, a dot in his eye, over on the other side just as she is in reality, in the house that was their grandparents’ on the better side of the river. Royalty visits Ellen’s side, as do film stars and the children of very rich people. But the estuary itself is just the visible statement of separation. Ellen has always been on the other side, although who is to say which side is the other and which the constant is anyone’s guess. ‘Make sure you get your five a day,’ he tells her.’ Just do this one thing for me.’

  It doesn’t really bother Bill that Ellen inherited the money. He chose another way, bikes, drink, the city and worse, and there was a time when he loved that life with a dirty, guiltless passion he wouldn’t have given up for anybody. You could say that seeing how things have turned out, the version of the world where Ellen got the house, the bonds, a modest amount of shares in safe bets, is entirely correct. It’s just that he has spent such a long time watching out for her you’d think he might be owed a little something. Over the years her fear has multiplied out of control like some invading virus, feeding first off her and then him and now the two of them have become fused into a new and ugly shape that wouldn’t have been discovered had Ellen been the sort of girl who just married a guy from school and got a job in a call centre. Maybe a child would have given her some perspective.

  The first few counselling sessions he went to after he was diagnosed were all about perspective. Mainly about how to achieve it and how to maintain it; maintaining it was traditionally the difficult part. The counsellor told him that it was normal to ask the question: why me? But this was not something Bill had ever asked. Why not him? This was a good response, a healthy attitude, he must have got it from some higher place, some kind of zen intuition. But he had not. He offered up the simple equation: you are the sort of boy who can’t quite find his niche, you do some drugs, it equals you meet the wrong people, you do the wrong things. Then you meet one right person and everything changes. You change. You try to atone for your old, unenlightened ways. You become a Mentor to Young People, then an advisor to the police where your job is to point out the windows that can be jimmied open; you are particularly good at noticing the vulnerable cat flaps and letterboxes. You do other, subtler things like always making a point of giving way to drivers when it is your right to go, and even though the one right person didn’t stick around long enough to notice your efforts and absolutely nothing is changed by any of this, the sum of it all is that at least you can say you tried. Actually it is quite a complex equation. Still. What did you try? Bill wants to ask his sister. Seriously, what did you try?

  ‘There are cherry tomatoes in my hanging baskets,’ he tells Ellen when she gets up to leave. ‘Go and help yourself when you get home. Make sure you do.’

  On Bill’s side of the ward the doctors do their rounds twice daily to issue medications and advice, and not much changes until you are sent across the corridor for theatre. The light is low and claustrophobic there and the nurses hurry through a space punctuated by the slide of ventilators and infusion pumps, inhuman sounds. Bill knows this because sometimes he stops and listens when he makes his way to the shared toilets, imagining that he is moving through the holes left behind by these noises. It is a bit like swimming through the wreckage of a shipping disaster. The relief at finding yourself still there, able to swim, is tempered by the presence of things floating past, someone’s shoes they will never wear outside again, or books so waterlogged that the words bear no resemblance to the language you’ve known all your life. These things tell of another kind of sadness, something the entire ocean can’t dilute away. Bill moves through the debris and wonders how many things are falling down to the sea bed while he shuffles off for a crap.

  There is a nurse, one of the younger ones, whom he likes. Newly qualified, he supposes, because she can only do observations and basic IV work. She has a name that you don’t hear very often these days, but the morphine makes him forgetful and most of the time he can’t think what, other than it is a flower name, not one of the prettier ones. She is a pretty girl though, with pre-Raphaelite hair and skin that seems hard and bright, like she is made of diamond. He is not so far gone that he hasn’t realised this is merely a mirage of the drugs. Her cheeks are covered in a fine hair that makes him wonder about anorexia, but that could just be the drugs too, interfering with the ability of his retina to evenly process light and shade, as they also interfere with his ability to control his bladder and remember what day of the week it is. Although it has never been Bill’s thing he can see why some men like their girls to wear nurses’ uniforms, something about the knee length skirt and the little hats having the power to make the wearer both a person you would like to fuck and a person you wouldn’t mind cleaning shit off your backside, and he guesses too that some men are imagining a place far away in a chintzy bedroom where girls are dressing up together and kissing it better.

  The pretty nurse comes to his bedside with a tray, the usual syringes; clexane, diazepam, and a few empty phials for bloods. Cocktail hour, he murmurs and she bends over him, but only to pick up his arm and conduct the necessary formalities.

  ‘William Hare,’ she reads, holding his wrist and checking the name against the pad on the drugs trolley. ‘Hospital number F34
67008.’

  ‘That’s me,’ he says. ‘Most people call me Bill, love, but for you I’ll make an exception. F34 is fine.’

  ‘Well F34,’ she says. ‘I’m just going to give you your sedative. Would you assume the foetal position and lift your top buttock, please?’

  The intimacy of these relationships startles him. These are girls who have seen inside you from every angle and there is no preparation, no forty minutes in front of the mirror to get ready for this kind of show. Nobody warns you about this when you are twenty-five. One day there will be strangers looking at your body, putting cameras inside you to rummage through the orchid pink gullies of your lower intestines, and when your veins collapse and someone comes running to flush them out, you will feel the same humiliation as losing a hard-on. Not that Bill would have liked to have been told. There was a time, before his legs became too weak to make the journey down to the hospital concourse, when he sank two pints of Pepsi in ten minutes and his gastrostomy bag exploded across two tables. The need to make his own mistakes, and by this he meant the grand rebellion of choosing his own diet, had been voracious, and he couldn’t think why he had wanted to drink so much and so quickly. The unfortunate nurse who found herself first on the scene hooked him back up without a fuss but for Bill, horrified by an image of a girl in the neighbouring seat groping in his stomach juices and coke for her purse, that has never been the end of it. He can picture the purse now, some sort of geometric print and glistening, washed across the floor in the tide.

  ‘Humour a dying man, can’t you?’ he says to the nurse, bracing himself against the cold sting of the hypodermic.

  ‘Tell me a story. Any story.’

  ‘What do you mean, like something made up?’ The pretty nurse doesn’t take her eye off the syringe, tongue just visible against her lip, concentrating on the glass like she’s tapping for a seam of gold. Not everyone is as diligent as she. There are always rumours about how when the wards get too full the nurses start doling out air bubbles, straight to the heart and starting with the old folks first, but Bill doesn’t believe them, watches her tapping away and thinks this must be how angels appear, not in an eruption of light but in a little blue uniform with breasts and everything.

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that what you call a story?’

  ‘All right! I know what a story is. I just didn’t get what you wanted it for.’

  ‘To pass the time. To remind me of the other world.’

  ‘The other world?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I can’t, anyway. I’ve only got five minutes.’

  But something in his eye must break her and because the matron is busy and she reckons on actually having at least eight, nine minutes before anyone will really notice what she is doing, the nurse relents and sits on the side of his bed. ‘Okay,’ she says, shrugging. Her cheek is unexpectedly broken by an entire dimple that seems as impossible as a complete rainbow and suddenly, incredibly, she is involved. Bill has involved her in the business of his dying. For a minute he feels bad about this. He is no longer F3467008, and this will not help her much, even if it makes things a little better for him.

  ‘Okay?’ he says.

  ‘I said it was okay! Now shoot. What kind of story do you want?’

  ‘I’ll go first to warm you up,’ he says and he tells her about the Pepsi and the gastrostomy bag.

  ‘That was Leila from ICU,’ she says. ‘Just about everyone’s heard that one. So you’re the Bagbuster. Lucky me.’

  Bill assumes that Leila from ICU is not the girl with the purse, but this isn’t made clear and he doesn’t ask. He isn’t sure in which version he’d have come off worst. The purse looked expensive and he supposes he should have offered to pay but now he feels a little buzz, having achieved infamy in this way. He tells the pretty nurse to go ahead, it’s her turn, and she puts her head on one side, ducking it to the left shoulder and then the right while she thinks. It isn’t hard to see this is the method by which she has won over men all her life, how she has made her father pay her phone bill or allow her to stay out late.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, finally. ‘This isn’t made up. But it is a good story. Are you ready?’

  She tells him that a girl was killed in one of the nurses’ houses. It was her boyfriend who did it, she says.

  ‘It’s always the boyfriend,’ Bill says.

  ‘So they say.’

  One of the Sisters turns an interested circle through the bay and the pretty young nurse draws the curtains with such expertise that Bill knows that at some point in her life she has lived opposite a boy and that he was probably about two years older than her and attractive. The nurse’s voice lowers.

  ‘Her name was Mariella. They found her naked on the living room floor. I heard she’d been stabbed fifty times. I mean, that’s anger.’

  ‘I knew someone who got stabbed once,’ Bill says, but the pretty nurse gives him a look that sucks the words he is about the say right back into a place where language doesn’t exist and the only vessels for communication are hands, eyes, invisible gestures that are picked up like radar. The look suggests she suspects him of inventing a stabbed friend just to poach back centre stage. She tells him how the police came and talked to everyone in the murdered girl’s block. ‘I heard it from an agency girl,’ she says. ‘No word of a lie, there was this one detective and he actually said, “There’s been a murder,” you know like on TV. There’s been a murder. I can’t do the accent.’

  Bill nods to show that he knows exactly what she means, even though she’s right, she can’t do the accent. ‘Anyway, they arrested him,’ she tells him. ‘The boyfriend.’

  Now Bill feels his body tense in one long contraction of longing to hear where this is going, because amazingly their positions have reversed and he is the one involved in her life, he is in the nurses’ housing, he is stumbling into the room where there is a bloodied body on the floor; it is his voice on the phone to the police, There’s been a murder. The longing builds into a wave. If he lets it go, it will smash him. He has seen how a wave can smash the human form right below his own house, down on the beach where it is dangerous to swim outside the flags. It is dangerous but people do it all the time and make it necessary for other people to risk their lives for them, all the time. He sees the wave coming. The wave is silent. It is vital he doesn’t let it break. He is back in Apollo 8, leaving the wave behind.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s the story.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s what you call a story?’

  ‘Well excuse me,’ she says. ‘I’m a nurse, not a fucking writer. Oh God. Are you going to report me for that?’

  ‘No,’ Bill says. ‘I stirred it up a bit.’

  There is a moment where he expects the nurse to leave and he is thinking of some way to say thank you for this thing she has just done for him, for being a light on a dark corridor in a way that is only barely a metaphor, when she says, ‘Actually, it might not be the whole story.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There was something else I heard. I heard it wasn’t the boyfriend at all, but some crazy patient. He reckoned he was in love with her or something, wouldn’t leave her alone. It was okay while he was stuck in here but then he got better. She reported it and all, but the police said they couldn’t do anything until he did something.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  The pretty nurse shrugs. ‘It’s what I heard.’

  Something occurs to him as the nurse stands to go, parting the curtains as if they are water, and for a minute he thinks he may have only imagined her and the body on the living room floor. But then she is in front of him again, waiting for him to speak. ‘I’m not some crazy patient, you know,’ he says finally, in case she is beginning to worry.

  ‘I know,’ she says, looping the cables of the emergency call button across the foot of his bed so he can reach it without leaning out. ‘I know. I mean, I’m pretty sure I could take you out if I had to. No offence.’r />
  Bill is nearly asleep when the same nurse comes back to check his sats, the sedative coursing through his system like a canoe flying over rapids. The feeling is like being drunk but stronger, wilder, as if it isn’t just the room that’s spinning but the whole world, and then he feels ridiculous because that’s exactly what is happening, it’s just that up until now it’s been hard to believe. She tells him she’s putting him on the oxygen for a while and with the first sharp new breath he suddenly feels many things in one, the billow of the pump, the cold, mineral smell of her skin as she cups the mask across his nose, the swing of the Earth. He sees the dent in her lip where health and safety regulations have demanded she remove a piercing. He sees that her eyes are not the same colour and that sometime in her youth she has had chickenpox and could not resist the urge to scratch.

  It is hard to tell because he isn’t even sure if this is sleep or a heightened state of wakefulness, but the pretty nurse is asking something. He only knows it is a question because her voice rises at the end of the sentence, but it doesn’t seem to stop, as though she has stepped off the sentence onto a ladder that has no end, climbing up and up and further and further away until all that exists of her is her voice, her question. Was that what you meant by the other world? she is saying, or it might be Are you comfortable? It occurs to Bill that her story has only made him realise that there are things happening all the time in places he doesn’t know by methods that would just never occur to a man like him, so perhaps it was exactly what he meant and also not what he meant at all. It is hard to be sure when he doesn’t know what he has been asked. ‘Yes, yes, perfect,’ he says.